


the dress looks nice on you

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Everybody Lives, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Light Angst, POV Jyn Erso, Romantic Friendship, Slow Burn, T Rating for swears
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21808168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: Rogue One survives. A gala is thrown in their honor. None of them really want to go, Jyn, least of all.One might think Jyn would be happy in a ball gown. She's not. Cassian, more than any of them, knows that
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso, Jyn Erso & Leia Organa
Comments: 41
Kudos: 87





	1. Chapter 1

They made her wear a dress. Well, not made, no one can make Jyn Erso do anything, not even the entire leadership council of the Rebellion. (Perhaps, especially not them.) But they’d asked for her to dress nicely. For the celebration, they’d said. For the Rebellion. For the sake of them all.

She’d complained, loudly. It’s a war. There’s no time for fancy clothes, let alone a celebration in their honor. How stupid could they be, really? There’s no time for nonsense like this.

Baze had complained in a similar manner, but it was Chirrut who had ultimately convinced her. (It was one of his talents, she had realized, to be the one to convince them all of the right thing.) He’d been speaking to his partner, hadn’t noticed Jyn listening (or perhaps he had, now that she reconsiders it), and had said _they give us medals to give everyone the simple hope that bravery will always be rewarded. Even when it cannot be. They give us medals to honor all those who died without one._

They’re figureheads, then, to put it bluntly. Jyn had never signed up to be a hero, let alone a figurehead. She’d hated it, so far. But the way people had looked at her as she’d walked past them, that day they had returned from Scarif, that had not left her mind. They had looked at her the way she used to look at the stars.

With hope in their eyes.

So, knowing that, Jyn finally decided she would go to the celebration. But, that is one matter and actually wearing the dress left to her by some literal princess is another. Jyn hates dresses. They’re hard to run in, harder still to fight in. This dress, especially, seems to have been made to be completely impractical. It shimmers with each ray of sunlight, glittering brighter than any credit chip she’d gotten her hands on over the years. A fitting metaphor, she thinks, given how many thousands of credits this dress must have cost. The neckline is low, scooping over the shoulders, and the sleeves, if one could call them that, were gossamer cords connecting to little cuffs on the wrists.

Jyn could still remember the feeling of a prisoner’s cuffs on her own wrists. These, made of pearl and silk, didn’t seem all that much different to her. Was she still a prisoner here, she wondered? Held not by force but by silken cords of guilt and obligation?

There’s a soft rap on the side of her door. She lifts her head. “It’s you.” Jyn says, flatly.

“So it is,” Cassian replies.

Cassian is still in his Rebel Alliance dress uniform, the faded browns somehow making his eyes seem brighter, even more intense. He’d also neatened the stubble around his beard and cut his hair, so that he looks younger, softer, than she had ever seen him. His hair looked soft, too, and it was tousled, as if he had been running his fingers through it.

Not that she looked at him enough to notice his hair. That would be stupid.

But the haircut looks nice, regardless.

She would never say that, of course. Jyn’s life is full of things left unsaid. Even now. Especially now. “You look weird,” she blurts out, just to make it clear that’s why it’s taken her long to say something. “In that. When do you go back to your normal clothes?”

He raises an eyebrow.

She sghs. “And what do you want, anyway?”

He shrugs, the gesture made more obvious by the sling his left arm is in, one of the many bandages from the med bay’s work. The fact that all of their strange little crew had been saved seemed so impossible to Jyn, and yet… it had been done. However, she is still doubtful that she will ever be _healed._ Vital organs can be repaired with bacta, bones can be set in slings, but no med droid could bandage her heart back together. She’s broken, still, in so many ways, and she doesn’t have the slightest clue how to begin to fix herself. She may have hope, now, but hope is only a light and not a path forward.

Cassian asks, “you ready?”

“I’m not going.”

He shrugs again.

“That’s it?”

“I’m not here to drag you to the celebration, Jyn.” His voice is clipped, sounding more tired than she would expect. She’d heard a rumor that he had taken part in a mission only a day after they’d been rescued. That he’d ignored his broken ribs to go save that same princess from the Death Star.

What she’d also heard, though, was that they had been too late, in some small way, and the Death Star had destroyed the princess’s planet. More death, more destruction, Jyn thinks, staining her hands. If only they had been faster...

“Then why are you here?” Jyn asks.

“I…” he shrugs a third time. “I was in the hallway.”

“The women’s quarter hallway?” Jyn is doubtful Cassian has ever spent much time down in these quarters.

“Nevermind.” His other arm is still hanging strangely behind his back, and she decides that’s

what’s bothering her. Cassian is hiding something, and she doesn't like it.

“You’re acting weird.”

“First I look weird and now I act weird,” He sighs. There is so much left unsaid in that sigh, Jyn things, that it could fill an entire holobook. It's been this way every time time the two of them had been left alone to talk. They'd been through so much, had challenged each other so much, had survived so much, and now, had so little to say to each other. It is strange, she knows, and what is stranger is the odd ache she feels every time he leaves, as if the words she's never managed to say wound her from inside.

"Cassian." She says his name, but nothing else. She tries one more. "I hate this damn dress and this thrice damned party."

He nods. "You've made that clear, Erso."

It does not escape her notice that she is back to last name terms with him. "Can't I wear a uniform, like you?"

"that would require you officially enlisting, something you've refused to do."

"I don't like obligations."

"You've made that clear as well." His posture straightens, looking far more the part of a solider and far less like a friend. “I’ll leave you be. If the dress doesn’t fit, Commander Ogana said to feel free to burn it.”

“She did not.”

“Maybe she did.” He clicks the door button, so it’s closing as he says, “but you’d have to come and ask her that yourself.”

Jyn sits for a while longer, mulling over all the words said and unsaid in that small moment. Eventually, she gives up and tugs on the dress. It’s tight in too many places, clinging to all the areas she prefers to keep hidden under baggy coats. Even the color, a bright purple-blue, is too much for her. It’s the sort of dress made for someone to stand out in. The sort of dress that is supposed to make a statement.

Jyn just wants to make an exit.

She’s about to give up when she notices a small flat package next to the dress. It’s wrapped in an old canvas sack and there’s a small note on the tag.

 _What we wear does not define what we are any more than our pasts can say who we will be in our futures-_ C.

Chirrut, of course. No one else would write such a thing. Or perhaps, Baze had transcribed it for him, given how messy the handwriting is. Jyn opens the bag. Her fingers touch soft fabric. A tiny gasp escapes her as she removes the object inside.

It’s a cloak with a hood, woven out of what felt like wool, spun incredibly fine. The fabric seemed to have been made from the night sky itself. It is the same blue-black color, its panels split so two hung over her front shoulders. How did Chirrut know she needed this? How did one do so many kind things for other people? Was this what it would be like, in her new life? Would she be able to... trust? in friends, in the hope that someone would really and truly have her back? It is a strange thought, one that leaves Jyn feeling even more unsettled. Because she would have to be a good friend in return, and that, she knows, she will be terrible at. It has been a long, long time since she'd used the word friend and meant it.

An even longer time since she'd had one she could count on.

Gratefully, she shrugs it on, pulling the narrow belt of the dress around the cloak instead. The gift is perfect, giving her back the safe anonymity the dress had stolen from her. Only now does her heart stop thudding so hard against her chest. Only now does she feel like she can breath again.

It’s made the whole ensemble better but no cloak or gift could fix the terror of the shoes left to her. They seem, to Jyn, to be made out of spun glass, and every step she takes in them is too small, too wobbly, to ever be practical.

She grits her teeth though, and starts walking.

When she finally does leave, she doesn’t notice the few flower petals left on the floor. They’re Yavinian wild daisies, the kind that grow only a few miles from the Temple. They flutter away with the breeze from the door whooshing open. If she had been quicker to leave, she would have noticed more petals making a small path toward the main part of the Temple complex, leading all the way to an out of the way shelf where someone had left a bouquet, clearly meant to be given, had the time been right, to someone dear. Instead, the bouquet, like so many other things, remained just out of sight, just a whisper away from belonging to someone.

Jyn reaches the doors of the grand gathering room and freezes. There’s no way she can go forward. She teeters on her stupid shoes, feeling as if she might fall over. The dress’s corset makes it too hard to catch her breath. All of her clothes feel too tight, too hot, too much.

This is wrong. She’s not supposed to be here. A tiny voice in her head whispers that she’s not even supposed to be alive.

Then, amid all the other voices, she hears one that pulls her forward, one that is just like that light of hope on the path ahead.

Cassian’s.

And he sounds, for once, like he is happy.

For his sake, she’ll go to this damn party.


	2. follow you

When Jyn opens the doors, she regrets it, instantly. Every head in the room swivels to stare at _her._ For a moment, she considers slamming her hand back on the doorpad, closing the doors once more, hiding from all of the attention that has focused on… on her. Not on the scene she’s making (because she hasn’t made one, at least not yet) Not on the stupid jewlery Leia talked her into or even the cloak. She can’t even blame their attention on the damn dress, because they’re looking at her face, trying to search her eyes, trying to see…

What? See the face of a so-called hero? See the courage that she supposedly has? See something in her that even she doesn’t see?

She’s here. That’s what they wanted, right? That’s what her friends asked of her, and she promised to be a better friend to them than she has been to anyone in a long time. Friends keep their word. And so, she’s here.

But fierfeking hells, she wishes she was anywhere else.

Silently, Jyn steps forward. Or rather, she tries to step silently, only to have the loud, too tight shoes clack against the ancient stone floor. It’s enough to make the usually surefooted woman stumble. She lurches forward, throwing out a hand to steady herself. The cloak spins around her, tangling in her legs.

That same hand smacks right into a young soldier holding a plate full of food, which then launches itself in the air.

 _Wonderful,_ she thinks, _just in case one person in this whole damn room **hadn’t** noticed I was here, they certainly do now._

A moment later, the soldier is apologizing to _her._ “No,” Jyn says. “it’s my fault. I’ll, uh, leave now. Yeah.”

She backs up, only to collide with a group of Rebel officers, all of them jubilant in their celebrations, smiling and laughing as if there hadn’t been a single casualty, as if the war had already been won.

“Why hello,” a woman with icy blue hair says, smiling at Jyn. Her badge says she’s a captain. The way her blaster is holstered says that she’s never had to fire it.

Jyn snarls, which is enough to make more than one of the officers back away.

“Miss Erso,” a more foolish young officer begins. Wedge, she thinks his name is, “Or is it Captain, or?”

“It’s none of your business.”

He spreads his hands in a movement to convey that he means no harm. “I only wanted to see if you’d like a drink.”

“I’m good,” she says, though she is anything but.

Pushing past him, Jyn stalks through the party, searching for her friends. It’s not a fancy party, not like the ones she dimly remembered her mother describing. Not like the ones the Emperor threw, is what she thinks, but it’s still too fancy for her. She’d rather be back in her room, a mug of warm Corellian tea in her hands, enjoying the silence before…

Before what? Another mission? Jyn isn’t sure she wants another mission. Not with these Rebels. Not if she can’t be…

Her thoughts trail off as she finally spots her friends. Bodhi, Baze, and Chirrut are all in the far corner of the room, speaking with that hotshot pilot from Tatoonie. How the hell, she thinks, is she supposed to get to them without being forced into dreadful small talk with someone else?

“Screw it,” Jyn mutters. “I’ll eat, then leave.”

She fetches a plate full of cheap and yet made to look as fancy as possible, foods. There’s a few real treats among them, Jyn can tell, but she only takes the smallest amount of those. She figures that as a newcomer here, she shouldn’t take more than her fair share of the really good stuff.

Next, she calculates how much more food she could shove in her pockets for later, only to remember the dress doesn’t _have_ any pockets. The snarl reappears on her face.

“What’s an outfit without pockets?” Jyn mutters, heading toward a bench, intent on eating first, getting seconds, then getting the heck of of the party.

It’s a good plan, until the crowd in front of her little bench parts, as if cut in half by a lightsaber. There’s few people the entire disjointed Rebel Alliance would all respect so easily, fewer still after all the losses from the mission and the battle.

But every Rebel, and perhaps, even Jyn, although she would do so grudgingly, respects the last princess of Alderaan enough to move out of her way.

The princess comes to sit next to her, moving effortlessly in her flowing gown. It’s white, stark white like bone, but on the princess, it looks more like the softest clouds in the brightest sky. Jyn has no idea how Leia’s able to hold her head so high when that coil of braid must weigh at least as much as an astromech droid.

Jyn has no idea how Leia can do anything she does, really. Maybe princess school, or whereever Leia spent her time before the war, taught her things that no other woman could know. Maybe Leia really is just that perfect. Jyn had considered, briefly, trying to actively dislike Leia, and found it nearly impossible when the princess had shown up with a bottle of wine, crackers, and definitely not-standard ration cheese. The two women had gotten tipsy then, chatting and laughing, both pretending there was not a war directly beyond their doors.

Both of them pretending, too, that they had not met once, a long time ago, when they had both been very young and the conflict that would become the war had been very new.

“How do you do it?” Jyn blurts out, and then lowers her voice. “How do you keep smiling, keep encouraging others, when you…” she stops. There’s not really a party-appropriate way to say, _when your whole planet is gone._

Leia shrugs, even that gesture as graceful as the soaring flight of a starbird. Jyn feels a lot more like a porg herself, stuffed into a too-tight, too-short dress, and tasked with walking in the stupidest shoes ever invented.

Then, Leia says, “You look deep within yourself, and find that peace that lies deep within your heart. Then, you offer it to those who need it.”

Jyn doesn’t know a lot of etiquette, but she knows better than to snort at a princess. All that’s in her heart, if she looks too deep, is rage. Cold rage. There’s fire too, but everyone can see Jyn’s fire. Everyone’s always been able to see the fire. Very few people have been able to stand the burn, to get close enough to know that inside the fire is just coldness, rage that has turned inward, like a neutron star collapsing on itself. The type of rage that can burn and burn and burn and no revenge she’s found has been able to quench.

In that moment, sitting in front of a plate full of the least moldy food she’s had in a while, Jyn is the most furious she’s been since she woke.

“Jyn,” Leia’s hand rests on her wrist. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

”Is it?”

I mean.” Jyn shrugs again, and she keeps her eyes low. She wonders if it would be proper to pull the cloak’s hood over her head and pretend she’s completely invisible. “Compared to what you’ve been through, I guess.”

Leia arches one eyebrow. “I’m aware of what I have gone through. But yet, I asked. Please answer.”

“I feel like a lie in this dress,” she admits, finally, staring down into the amber liquor. She’d gotten herself a drink, along with the food, but finds that she’s lost her taste for alcohol, ever since coming to Yavin IV. She’s lost a great deal of things since coming here. But, she tries to tell herself she has gained things too. But in this moment, sitting next to a veritable princess, with enough jewelry on her own skin to buy herself a ship, to buy her own freedom, Jyn finds herself only aware of all that she’s lost. “I’m not someone who wears shi-uh, stuff like this.”

“You know what?” Leia leans in, as if to tell a secret. “Neither am I.”

That just makes Jyn snort, half with laughter, half annoyed. “You’re a princess.”

“Of what?” Leia replies. Jyn nearly drops her own glass in shock, which would be just the icing on the ahui’li cake of embarrassment for the night. There had been so much bitterness, so much pain in Leia’s voice, so much emotion that the woman had kept locked away.

Jyn knows far too well how that feels. “This… this whole party is ridiculous.”

Leia sighs. “I know. But please, just... “

“Keep smiling?” Jyn rolls her eyes. She thinks about cracking her knuckles, but that might break one of the rings Leia had loaned her.

Leia shakes her head. “Please, just be true to yourself.”

* * *

Her plan to vanish after she’s eaten fails, because by the time she’s had her seconds, a crowd stands between her and the door. Worse than just a crowd, this one is… dancing.

Someone had rigged up some sort of a sound system and old-timey Mon Calamar orchestral music flutters over the sounds of people chatting, the whirl of fabric and the scuffing of boots.

Jyn looks down at her feet and desperately misses her own boots.

Trying hard to honor whatever advice Leia gave her, she figures she’ll sit a little while longer, until the dancing mob loosens enough that she can slid through without much notice.

But, unlike her, it seems like all the rebels deeply, deeply, enjoy dancing. She sees Chirrut head out to the center area, intent on teaching Bodhi some sort of dance she’d never seen before, with Baze watching from close by, his warmest sort of glare on his face. Jyn notices the man is tapping his foot to the music. She wonders if he’d be the type to dance alone with Chirrut and resolves to ask her friend, later, if her hunch about that is true.

It’s her one moment of smiling, before she notices the _line_ of young, stupid rebels, waiting to ask her a question.

They all want to ask the same question.

As if she’d ever dance. Here, or anywhere.

Jyn snarls at anyone foolish enough to ask, until they all have learned to leave her alone.

A little while later, it’s Cassian who finds her. The crowd does not part for him, not like it did for Leia, even if Cassian, as much as the princess, had dedicated his life to the cause. The crowd doesn’t even seem to notice him as he slips past them, his boots completely silent, his motions as graceful as water rolling over smooth river stones.

When he reaches her, there is a ghost of a smile on his face. It doesn’t match his neatly trimmed facial hair and his sharp uniform, she thinks. He looks the way a hero, a real hero, should look, and a real smile should match that. Selfishly, though, Jyn is glad to see that he’s not smiling. There had been a strangely terrible moment where she had thought she’d seen him on the dance floor, thought he’d held a woman in his arms and had led her around the floor in twisting whorls of motion and desire.

Jyn had been wrong though, and had been embarrassed to be relieved at being wrong. What did it matter to her who he danced with?

“Don’t worry,” he says, hands up. “I am not asking for a dance.”

“Good.”

“You nearly made Skywalker cry with your vicious refusal.”

Jyn shrugs. The kid was sweet, sure, but she isn’t in a dancing mood. Not now, not ever. “He should dance with the Princess instead.”

Cassian’s eyebrows furrow. “Chirrut stated that might not be his best idea.” He lifts his non-injured shoulder. “He added some phrase about twin… stars maybe? I was… preoccupied.”

Hopefully that didn’t mean he was already thinking of his next mission. He needed to heal. More than any of them, perhaps, Jyn thought. Because Cassian’s wounds were deeper than just the ones the med droids could see. She’d heard him cry out in his sleep, while they had all tried to rest on the U-Wing, had seen the shadows under his eyes.

Jyn shakes her head. “Yeah, well, coming here definitely wasn’t one of my better ideas.”

“Where would you rather be?”

Jyn almost, almost thinks of telling him, “back on Scarif. ” Just to watch the reaction spread across his face.Just to watch him, like everyone else, grow frustrated enough with her to leave her alone. But even thinking of doing that, at least to him, feels wrong. To everyone else, sure, she can push them away with sharp words and cold smiles. But to Cassian? To the man who… well, fuck trying to sum up everything they’ve been through recently. She doesn’t have the words, or the emotions for that shit. It’s enough, she thinks, to know he matters to her.

Not that she’ll tell him, or anyone else, that.

So she says, “somewhere I belong.”

He nods, sips his drink. Or appears like he’s sipping his drink, though she’s noticed he never quite does. The liquor level always remains the same, and Cassian always remains sober. He’s good at faking that. He’s a spy. Is that what the Rebellion will make her? Now that she’s survived the mission that she shouldn’t have?

Jyn doesn’t know who she is, but she knows she doesn’t want to be made into… into this. Into some glittering figurehead, draped in jewels and swaddled in silks so tightly that she cannot run.

Jyn has been running for so long that sitting still is its own unique form of agony.

“Where do you think you belong?” Cassian asks her, titling his head, just a little. There’s such sincerity in his eyes that it makes her feel more than a little guilty for her sulking. She draws the cloak tighter around her shoulders, feeling suddenly cold. The fabric smells faintly of wildflowers, she realizes, with the slightest hint of a spicy-sweet scent that seems almost… familiar. As if she had smelled it before, more than once.

“You tell me,” Jyn mutters. “You’re the one who got me here.”

“Come on.” He sets the drink down. It is, she sees, completely untouched. Then, he turns on his heel, crisply, a maneuver as precise as any one would see on the dance floor, and starts walking.

“Wait,” she starts. “Cassian!”

But he’s already cutting through the crowds of troops, moving the way rain falls on glass, changing path when he encounters an obstacle. SHe’s never seen anyone move like him, so graceful and yet so on edge. Despite his injuries, despite how tired he must be, Cassian moved confidently in the direction of his goal.

When she follows, she knows her steps aren’t nearly as smooth. She wobbles and missteps in her too-tight shoes, stumbles foward, trips over the edge of her cloak. The dress limits her stride, making her own progress so small, her pace so slow, compared to him. Cassian knows who he is and where he is going. Jyn, on the other hand, just feels lost, trapped in a ridiculous dress, and devoid of any sort of understanding of what might come next. It's the uncertainty she hates, even more than the outfit. The gala, the night, they're all just delays, all just distractions from the inevitable, impossible question that none of them want to ask and all of them fear the answer to:

What's next for Rogue One?

Where is Jyn's path going to lead, now that she is walking it here, on Yavin IV, surrounded by Rebels and weighed down with the legacy of her heroics?

The questions circle her mind, making her as dizzy as if she'd drank the whole glass. She puts a hand to her head to rub her temple, but is distracted by the swinging of her earrings. "Ugh," she scowls. "Enough." 

She yanks off the earrings, the necklace, the rings, and balls up all the finery in a glitting mess, then shoves it somewhere below the neckline of her dress, trusting its tight material to hold everything there. "Shoulda done this with another one of those pastries, too," she mutters.

Cassian laughs, the only sign he'd heard or seen her. 

Jyn blushes, which feels as foreign to her as the jewelry, but far more impossible to remove.

* * *

Cassian leads her down one dark hall, and then another. Even with his limp, he’s walking faster than Jyn can in these ridiculous shoes. She gives up when he turns a corner and she’s alone in some random hallway on this stupidly large base. Instead of chasing after him, she tugs off one shoe, teetering on the other to do so. The silvery ties rip in her hand and she lets them fall to the ground. If the princess is upset to have her fine footwear ruined, well, Jyn had warned her she’s a disaster at formal events. The second shoe is much easier to get off. Holding both shoes in her hand, she starts to walk and tries to tell herself she doesn’t mind the floor. She’s walked plenty of places barefoot when she’s had to.

She turns the corner, and Cassian, without looking back at her, lobs something over his shoulder. Jyn catches it, finding the item soft, and a bit warm. Stopping to examine the bundle, she finally understands, and mutters, “socks?”

“Floor’s cold,” he retorts.

But they weren’t his socks, at least, not the socks on his feet. They are warm and clearly hand-knitted.The grey wool is soft and pleasantly rough to her fingertips. Not rough like prison clothes, no, but the sort of gentle snags and loose threads that came from a homemade garment, like the ones her father used to make her. These socks, she can tell, were knitted with care, as much care and precision as her father had once sewn her toy stuffed animals. Had Cassian made them? And had he put them in his pockets for just this reason?

Why was he so tough to figure out when everyone else was so simple?

Then, Cassian turns to a simple keypad. He types in a code. She’s always liked watching his fingers work. He’s agile, quick, accurate. He’s precise. She likes that about him.

Well, she likes him about that because it’s practical. That’s all. Makes him a good buddy in a fight. That’s all she needs, after all. A fight. Jyn lives for the fight, not for anything else, not even for herself.

The door whooshes open. Cassian steps inside. Jyn follows.

She follows him into the dark, follows him without any question, without any hesitation.

In doing so, she walks completely into the unknown. The moment she crosses over the threshold is just as terrifying as the moment she had entered the celebration hall… only… it’s not. Being close to Cassian somehow mutes her fears, calms her nerves. His very presence is like a bacta patch covering her anxious thoughts.

The room is completely dark and silent, a stark contrast to the bright, noisy hall they’d just been in, Cassian presses a button and old, low-level lights hum into life, casting more shadows than illumination. Jyrn hadn’t wondered where he’d lead her, she realized with a start, as memories of other halls, of other dark places and silences that led to disaster.

She’d… she’d just kriffing trusted him, like an idiot. When was the last time she’d let anyone lead her so easily? When was the last time she’d followed without questions, without demands?

It hits her hard, somewhere below her ribcage. She trusts Cassian.

Sure, she technically knew that, had known that for weeks now, but it’s one thing to trust someone to have your back in a firefight and another to simply… trust them.

So, Jyn enters the room, every one of her steps hampered, not by wounds, but by this damn dress. She supposes, for a moment, in the grand scheme of things, it is better to be in a terrible dress and alive, than nothing at all.

And it is better than just all right, she knows, to have someone who trusts her and who she can trust.

Even though she has no idea why he’s led her away from the party.

* * *

A moment later, there’s a crackling hum as Cassian flips on the electro-circut for the room. He leans against the wall, then, folding his arms. His posture is completely at ease, but his eyes never stop watching Jyn.

The lights reveal a sparse, industrial room with durasteel walls and slightly rusted support beams. Crates are stacked to make a semi-partition in the middle of the room, hiding most of whatever is to her left. A ‘fresher door (all Alliance ones for humanoid use have the same logo, regardless of gender) is in one corner, and equipment for cleaning blasters, repairing droids, and other common tasks sits on a table in the other corner she can see. It's a practical, sparse room, without a bit of personality or warmth. Jyn finds she rather likes it that way, or at least, she does, until she notices what there isn't. There are no windows. A moment's panic bubbles up, hard against her breastbone.

“There’s a second exit, past the crates,” Cassian says.

Of course he’d been able to read her expression as she surveyed the room. Of course he’d know she hated feeling trapped. And of course, he wouldn’t lead her anywhere unsafe, not without a warning.

“Is it locked?” she asks. The door looks solid, safe, a good barrier keeping the rest of the galaxy away from them.

“Locks from the inside,” he replies. “You can check it.”

“No, I…” she tries out the words, “I trust you.” The words, she realizes, taste more decadent, more scandalous, than any of the fine foods she’d been offered at the banquet.

The words, though given simply, are enough to make Cassian smile. Jyn finds herself mirroring the expression, and for once, meaning it. This place, this silent, cold warehouse of a room is a thousand times more comfortable, lightyears better than the gala they had just left.

For a moment, she doesn’t notice how her shoes pinch, or how the dress cuts into her ribs, or even how fast her heart is racing, all because of that simple smile from him.

All Jyn notices, in that moment, is that Cassian, too, is more relaxed here.

Just then, the door whirs open once more.

**Author's Note:**

> This is multi chapter, so comments are very encouraged as they're my favorite motivation. :) Thank you for reading!


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